I was hoping to use Atom to describe a range of things within Mauvespace, such as blogs, logs and so on, but it appears that even though there is a mapping from Atom to RDF, there is no inverse mapping from that RDF vocabulary to Atom, because it is not universally possible to convert in that direction.

For example, the <atom:author> element mandates exactly one child element <atom:name>. Even if an RDF reasoner can assume an author has a name, it does not necessarily know what it is. Also, if you pull Atom data from two feeds written under different pseudonyms into an RDF model and then claim that two authors are the same, the model stops being able to distinguish which name each feed was written under, unless you add a vocabulary to subclass Atom authors as pseudonyms of FOAF people.

These may seem like gripes about the mapping, but it's more serious than that. It means that there is no bijection between an arbitrary RDF model and a valid Atom 1.0 document.

I can see a few options:

Map RDF to Atom only. Construct a mapping from any sensible RDF model structure to Atom. That this would not be bijective means that the software could not import from Atom. An alternative RDF version would have to be provided to import triples.

Work instead with RSS 1.0, which is pure RDF but is widely considered deprecated and isn't as expressive as Atom anyway. Trivially, however, this is bijective.

Map Atom to RDF only. Create a separate Atom store and map into RDF only temporarily when I need to reason upon it or style it with the RDF template code. Lack of bijection means the store could not invariably re-export Atom intact. Synchronising updates bidirectionally between Atom and triple store becomes an issue.